


camera shy

by rjosettes



Series: Tumblr Fics [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Online Dating, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Minor Scott McCall/Kira Yukimura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 12:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4786634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/pseuds/rjosettes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Stiles can't bear Reddit anymore, he resorts to Tumblr for his porn and gaming needs. He has no idea what he's getting himself into when he follows photgrapher aargentsf on a whim, but nonetheless...he thinks he's gonna like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	camera shy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Stallison Week on tumblr as well as the square 'Tumblr friends' on my Teen Wolf Bingo card 1.0.

Stiles doesn’t track his own tag, half because no one bothers learning the seemingly random string of characters in his url (what a bright idea, using his first name and middle initial) and half because anyone who wants to talk to him just shows up in his inbox sooner or later. He’s not here for followers, anyway. He’d had to get his ass away from Reddit as fast as he could make a graceful exit, and he’d heard there was plenty of porn on Tumblr. A few great video gaming update and tip blogs later, he was pretty sure he could get along here better than in the toxic waste dump he’d been wading through. R/tumblrinaction can go fuck itself.

He does, though, keep a track on aargentsf. Her blog is pretty popular even though she hasn’t been on the site much longer than him. Following her had been…not exactly an accident, but definitely not a run at friendship. There’d been a black and white shot on one of the tamer porn blogs he followed, where some of the pictures were safe for work – a girl in a tank top and rumpled sleep shorts taking a photo of herself in the mirror, camera obscuring her face. There was nothing particularly sexual about it, but Stiles had been drawn to it. The reflection of the girl’s room, greyscale daubs of paint on the wall as if she hasn’t decided how to paint yet and half-unpacked boxes in the corner. Her bedclothes askew, like she’d climbed straight out of bed and taken the photo. He’d clicked the follow button from the dashboard without checking what else might be on her blog.

Turns out A. Argent is a photographer. She’s in her senior year of high school, just like Stiles, but he knows she’s a year older than him. The ‘about’ page on her blog says she moves a lot but is settled for now in San Francisco; it also tells him that outside of photography, she likes fashion, archery, and gymnastics. So, to recap, she’s a pretty, stylish girl from the city who’s multitalented. Exactly the kind of girl that would never look twice at Stiles in real life. Lydia’s from right here in town and he can’t even get her to learn his name. He’s made marginally better progress with Danny after years, but he’s definitely still striking out. He abandoned his virginity in a wine cellar with a girl that didn’t really like him that way, which was fine and all, but it’d be nice to have sex more than once, ever. Somehow dying having had sex only once seems even worse than dying a virgin.

He doesn’t pay a lot of attention to his activity page and has all of his email notifications turned off for the site, not wanting to clutter his already swamped inbox. So, of course, he doesn’t realize she’s followed him back for about two weeks, when she likes a screenshot he posted from the game he’s spending most of his free time on. He has no idea what the fuck to do for about five minutes, made worse by the fact that Scott is with him and has no idea why this is a big deal. A. Argent’s blogroll is less than fifty icons, most of them for other photography blogs. There is absolutely no reason to be following his shitty gaming and personal blog, especially when there are virus blogs with urls not much different from his popping up all over the place.

Scott talks him down for a while and even does Stiles a solid, manning the keyboard with his much steadier hands. Together they compose the most casual message they can (in Word so they don’t send too quickly) and then delete it entirely, starting over. Stiles doesn’t want to sound disinterested. He’s so interested. It does come out a little better than 'wow this is so cool holy shit’, since his co-author is a lot more calm and less prone to fanboy outbursts. Pasting it into her ask and pressing send Stiles does himself, just to feel accomplished, and he and Scott high five and immediately dive into a first-person shooter to distract themselves from the fact that she could reply at any time.

That was six weeks ago almost to the day, and Stiles is lucky if he can go a few hours without checking Tumblr or a whole class without shooting off a text. Allison – the A in A. Argent – is doing her senior year through an online K-12 program that she’d decided on after too many years of bouncing around the country, even getting held back once. She texts him all throughout the day because her classes are whenever she feels like, as long as she stays on track to graduate in time to start college the next fall. It’s bizarre to get so many messages from someone who isn’t Scott, Harley, or Kira, but he’s definitely not complaining. Having friends who know everything about him has always been a positive thing for Stiles; a friend like Allison, so new she’s still learning things every day, is a fascinating new experience.

Allison doesn’t want to study photography in school because she doesn’t think she’s any good. Which, that’s fucking laughable, but Stiles is all about choice. Her dad sells firearms to cops, which she seems to think is worthwhile but not for her, thanks to all the traveling she’s endured growing up. She makes friends quickly but not deeply everywhere she goes. That doesn’t surprise Stiles a bit. She’s funny and sweet but not above talking shit if Stiles has a bone to pick about someone. She humors his rants about Jackson far better than Scott ever does, with his persistent belief that there’s something good about everyone. Scott is mistaken.

Stiles gets to talk about himself more than anyone else will actually let him. He tells Allison about how much worse at photography he would be; he can barely focus long enough to take a selfie, much less perfectly frame a shot to be art. He’s decently good at school if he makes sure not to put off homework so long that it’ll never get done. His friends help with that; official homework and study days with other people who can redirect him when he gets lost down the rabbithole are the best way to keep himself in line. Video games are fun but not exactly the kind of passion he can devote his life to, considering his complete lack of artistic talent.

Basically, they’re a couple of aimless kids about to graduate high school with no idea what to do after. College for both of them, they know, though those aren’t set in stone yet. For now, they focus on slogging through this last year and the things that take their minds off of it – their pictures, their games. Each other. Stiles hopes so, at least.

Two thirds of Stiles’s best friends have been fed up with his constant talk about Allison for a few weeks already, but even Scott seems to be clinging to his last straw today. Every time Stiles taps the home button on his phone to make sure he hasn’t mixed a text from Allison (despite having his ringer as high as it will go for the duration of lunch), Scott gives him this little look – almost pity, but primarily just 'really, Stiles?’.

“Look, she hasn’t texted me since she woke me up for school this morning, okay? I’m worried. She never just disappears like this, not without telling me where she’s going and when she’ll be back. She could be hurt or she could’ve decided she hates me or -”

“Or she could be napping, or hooking up with someone who will actually ask her out,” Harley says pointedly, her attention temporarily drawn away from her brown bag lunch. “Since someone doesn’t have the balls.”

Kira shakes her head furiously, chewing through her mouthful before she opens up to speak. “Nothing to do with balls, I’d have asked her out weeks ago. Stiles just can’t handle rejection. Other than the decade of it from Lydia.”

Scott frowns at her, and Stiles can feel him nudging her knee with his under the table disapprovingly. “She’s not going to reject him. I had to type half of the messages he sent her before they started texting each other. She likes him. She’s just waiting for him to say something. He just keeps telling her how great she is and leaving out the other important part.”

“The part where he thirst followed her?”

He tries his best to scoff at Harley and her turkey sandwich, but she’s got him there. “Yeah, yeah. You guys just change the subject. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” He scrolls up to their texts from the night before – his own complaints of sleeplessness and her lack of inspiration, nothing new to put up on her blog for a few long weeks that have dragged on. He’d told her just to queue up a few self-reblogs if she was so worried. Was that the wrong thing to say? Stiles doesn’t know. This is the part he’s apparently shitty at. He can’t work out how to solve his own feelings, much less anyone else’s. Hungry, tired, horny – these things he can fix. Stiles has never sought out inspiration; things spark and flare in his mind and consume him until they don’t, half finished.

Unsure of what to do, he vaguely apologizes for (possibly?) being insensitive and ratchets down the volume of his phone with regret for class. On second thought, he shuts it all the way down. He wouldn’t put it past himself to try and check when he’s with one of his more vindictive teachers, like fucking Harris, and get it taken away. In his backpack, it’s out of sight and out of mind, if he has any luck at all. Judging by his track record, he shouldn’t be getting his hopes up.

With a dedicated mix of rhythmic pen-tapping and intentionally driving more than one person up the wall, Stiles makes it through the afternoon and his entire drive home without digging out his phone. Of course, as soon as he swerves into his parking spot and kills the Jeep, he’s diving into the floor in front of the passenger’s seat to find it. No need to go in the house yet, just. Phone.

Adorably, he has a text from Kira asking if Allison ever got back to him. At least someone gets it. All the breath whooshes out of his lungs when he sees he has, not just a 'hi, how was school’ text, but also a voicemail from Allison. Amazing. The actually making calls part of this friendship is relatively new and makes Stiles nervous, because he’s even more likely to babble when he can do it with his mouth instead of his thumbs. Still, he’ll get to hear her voice and maybe get an explanation for what went down today.

“Hey Stiles, it’s Ally.” He closes his eyes and smiles, thinking of the few pictures of her face her has saved to his computer and the way she doesn’t let very many people call her by a nickname. “My mom wanted to do a big buy for the boutique today, and she wanted me to help her out. She’s worried she’s not 'fresh’ enough to pick stuff out for people our age.” She laughs and Stiles, despite not having a mother for a decade, feels like he understands perfectly. Or at least he’d say he does. “She gets frustrated if I use my phone while she’s working. I should have warned you before we left! Call me when you get this, or just text if you want. I want to hear about that presentation second period.”

The thing about Allison is she doesn’t sign off with anything. Oh, if they’re talking at any important transitional times, she knows what’s appropriate – 'have a good day’ before school or 'sweet dreams’ before bed. But where Scott says 'love you’ even if he’s half-asleep or in a crowded room and Harley sarcastically says 'kisses’ before she hangs up on him, Allison just finishes what she has to say and ducks out. It’s always a little unsettling, but the overall tone of the message reassures him a lot. She wants him to call. She probably doesn’t want to hear about his English presentation, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Only Stiles has never really agreed with that sentiment before.

His anxiety bleeds away over the course of the evening. He does call, and they end up talking about a lot of things that aren’t his schoolwork. She sends a few pictures of dresses she’d grabbed for herself while she shopped with her mother, and even one of herself in her favorite, the buttons up the front mismatched in her haste to show it off. She bites her lip like she’s trying not to smile but she fails gloriously and Stiles is, like. The definition of undone. His body can’t decide whether it wants to fuck or to melt into nonexistence. He has like five seconds to feel guilty about thinking of her that way before she’s demanding a picture in return. She complains when he makes a goofy face when these are all she gets of him, so he keeps it simple, ruffling his hair into something casual but presentable and smiling for the shot.

Later, she puts up pictures of the dresses along with a link to her mother’s boutique. Any pictures of her modeling the merchandise are conspicuously missing, and he starts to think Scott – commander in chief of #positivity – could be right. That maybe something is actually happening here that just needs a little extra push. He’s not ready for it that night, but he has a while, doesn’t he? Allison hasn’t talked about seeing anyone.

He takes a lot of shit from his friends for freaking out over the next few days, especially after he catches himself showing off the haul of clothes to all of them.

“She could be in a ditch,” Harley wails, flailing her arms in a way that expects is meant to mimic him. He doesn’t see the resemblance.

“A very fashionable ditch!” Kira chimes in, giggling, and even Scott has a sheepish smile on his face, like he can’t help himself. Stiles only feels a little betrayed. Allison’s fine, after all, so there’s something to be happy about. It is a little funny that he’d thought she might have randomly decided she hated him and was never going to speak to him again, especially after her scratchy-voiced wakeup call to him the morning she’d gone AWOL. Even a girl as talented as Allison can’t pull a 180 on him that fast.

Allison stops complaining about feeling uninspired, but there’s also nothing new on her blog. Stiles assumes she’s working on something new and prods her about it occasionally. He knows the steps that she goes through at this point – finding an idea, scouting locations (if she needs them), taking the pictures, shopping them on her computer. Not as simple as the pointing and clicking Stiles always thinks of when he imagines it. She admits she’s working on a project but is tight-lipped about it for now. He gets a couple of late-night shots from her phone of her coffee mug next to her big desktop, editing program minimized so that all he can see is the stub of a title, 'nice t’. He jokingly asks if she’s decided to move toward nude models so wholeheartedly as to name her picture 'nice tits’ and she laughs, which makes him feel less tasteless, and that’s that.

He’s scrolling tumblr a few nights later when he feels like the joke is on him. He has blacklist for a bunch of reasons – he doesn’t wanna see a fucking needle on his dash, for one, and he also doesn’t want his dad wandering past with a big dick in the middle of his screen. So needles are right out, and he keeps nsfw and any number of 'naughty’ words on there so he can selectively choose when to check out porn.

There’s a post from Allison’s blog blocked for containing the tag #nsfw.

He was joking. What the fuck. He’s almost afraid to click. Instead of opening the post on his dash, he follows it to her blog. Maybe she’s just being extra careful about her pajama pics lately, or someone asked her to tag something that isn’t a bunch of naked people under her not safe for work umbrella.

It shows up as a photoset, the pictures small and neat, eight in total. The caption at the bottom is signed A. Argent as always and the date is there – yesterday’s, so it’s something he missed for a while. The title, of course, is right there in italics before anything else.

Stiles.

He follows the instructions (click for full view) and opens the first shot with his breath caught behind the lump in his throat. He has to blink a few times to make sure he’s seeing things right, looking away and looking back in. The shot was clearly taken in a classroom from just above and slightly to the left of a standard right-handed desk. The whole foreground is blurry, though – the desk, the test paper sitting on top of it. The only thing that is clear about the photo is the straight path from the photographer’s eye to a tiny, silver gum wrapper wadded up about four inches from a waste basket in the corner. He can see every crumple in it, how near the shooter was to making their shot from their seat.

The others are just as fucking bizarre and familiar. He recognizes which shot must be 'nice t’ immediately, and he’s flabbergasted. Allison’s work is always so focused,even when everything is soft and low-lit. He’s not sure if she did something to the shutter speed or if she was actually running when she took the picture. It’s somewhat blurry, screams nothing but immediate motion, and catches very neatly the back of someone’s sarcastic printed t-shirt. There are a few strands of long dark hair across the frame, as if the wind were whipping and Allison had only looked over her shoulder to snap a picture, never stopping. One picture is obviously just Allison’s bedroom, though a little messier, the night outside deep blue-black but everything bright white inside, the digital clock on the bedside table glaringly informing the viewer that it’s four in the morning. The nsfw turns out to be for a shot of Allison’s computer screen – her dashboard, in fact. There are scattered words bolded and over-large, blurred-out faces in photos except for a vivid, frozen gif of two people having sex.

The last shot, well, Stiles isn’t even sure how she got it. He’s pretty sure the hands and phone that are the subject belong to Allison, and his mind is already alight trying to imagine how she rigged her camera to shoot downward like that without fucking up the picture or needing someone else to take it for her. Or maybe them, rather than it, as it almost looks like there are several photographs superimposed over one another. Allison’s fingers are all over the place, copies of them spread across the keyboard on her phone.

The screen reads, “I like you a lot.”

One solid finger, not a copy, not an indecisive flicker of motion, hovers over the send command.

It’s nearly midnight but Allison doesn’t have school in the morning, and Stiles finds himself dialing without any control over his own hands. He can’t even feel them all that well, actually. It’s really weird, because Lydia Martin has actively looked at him – like, intentionally – probably three times this year and though he dropped things two of those times, he never felt like this. Like his heart was going to race right out of his chest and he might not mind.

“Hello?” Her voice is too bright for her to be on the verge of sleep, too knowing for her to think he hasn’t found what she’s been waiting for him to find. “Stiles?” she asks after a beat or two of silence. He can just picture her teeth making that perfect divot in her bottom lip, smile slowly beginning to fade as she reconsiders her grand gesture because he can’t get his fucking shit together. He can’t stand for that. Stiles Stilinski may not have many morals, but he damn sure will not let a girl like Allison suffer over something he can fix by not being a coward for four seconds.

“I like you a lot, too,” he says, all in a rush. “I like you so much, actually, and I didn’t think you would ever go for it – hell, I never thought you would even follow me back, I wasn’t expecting it and Scott almost had to give me a cool sponge bath because things were happening a little too fast and I -”

“Stiles.”

“But I knew you would never be awful about it like some people can be – fucking Danny – and so I didn’t want to even put you, like, in that situation? I figured I could just shut up and then you’d find some new thing you’re into and forget Tumblr and everything would go back to norm-”

“Stiles,” she says more firmly, and he feels his teeth clack as his mouth shuts too fast, obedient. “I like you.”

The balloon full of words expanding in his head pops just like that. “Yeah,” he says, nearly awed. “Uh. So I heard. Saw. Whatever.” She laughs at him, the same old laugh as always, like this doesn’t change anything. It…it doesn’t. She liked him the last time she laughed at him, and she likes him now. “That’s…”

“A good thing.” Allison sounds more confident than he’s probably ever felt in his life. “I think so, at least.”

He wishes he could see her face right now, match her smile to her voice and the both of them to whatever she wears right before bed when she’s most comfortable. “Hey, but. Look. Do you have Skype?”

They find a whole new rabbithole to fall down together.


End file.
